Google’s Chrome browser has added a new feature that could go a long way in preventing a form of account takeover that’s grown increasingly common as users adopt two-factor authentication, passkeys, and similar protections.

The new Chrome protection is known as device-bound session credentials (DBSCs). The measure stores a unique encryption key in a silicon-resident fortress that’s built into the device running the browser. On Windows machines, this fortress is called a TPM, short for Trusted Platform Module. On macOS and iOS, it’s known as a secure enclave. Other platforms have differing names. Recently released versions of Chrome for Windows and macOS generate a key that’s stored in this fortress.

An antidote to session cookie theft

DBSCs protect against the theft of session cookies, the unique strings of characters that websites store on browsers. Session cookies greatly speed up browsing on sensitive sites that require user authentication. Instead of requiring the exchange of credentials each time a user opens a new site page, the server sets a session cookie that effectively proves the user has already successfully logged in.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

Last week, a researcher outlined what he said was a “novel attack surface” in passkeys, the new authentication paradigm that offers a more secure alternative to password-based methods. In fact, the attacks demonstrated in the post are neither novel nor unique to passkeys. This distinction is important because the research has generated confusion among end users and security professionals as they assess whether this new mechanism is truly safe to use.

The attack is called Pass-ta-key—a blending of the word passkey with the phrase “pass the key” and a nod to a plate of pasta. Arie Olshtein, a researcher at security firm Palo Alto Networks, described in a post last week how Pass-ta-key could obtain all passkeys stored in the Google Password Manager app (GPM) for Windows when it’s running on a machine infected with malware.

This came as a surprise to many people because they believed passkeys are stored exclusively in the trusted platform manager (TPM), the locked-down enclave in a hardened silicon chip that’s reserved for storing cryptographic keys and other highly sensitive information on Windows machines. If passkeys are stored in the TPM, then how was Pass-ta-key able to extract the entire set of passkeys stored by the app, they wanted to know.

Read full article

Comments

© Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Thousands of Internet-connected servers sold by the world’s biggest manufacturers can be remotely backdoored by exploiting critical vulnerabilities—some more than a decade old—that lurk deep inside system motherboards, according to research presented Wednesday.

Baseboard management controllers are miniature computers that are embedded into the motherboards of virtually every enterprise server. The microcontrollers, typically abbreviated as BMCs, run with their own operating system firmware, network stack, and IP address. Administrators rely on them to monitor the physical status of large fleets of servers and to perform a variety of tasks, including rebooting machines, installing updates, and even reinstalling operating systems. BMCs provide what’s known as “lights out” and “out-of-band” management because they work even when servers they’re attached to are turned off or are unresponsive.

A “pervasive, under-monitored, under-patched parallel attack surface”

Researchers have warned since at least 2013 that BMCs present a golden opportunity for hackers looking for ways to gain deep and persistent access to datacenters. The chief culprit was IPMI, the protocol that allows BMCs to operate independently of servers and to perform administrative tasks. Vulnerabilities in this firmware made it possible for attackers to remotely execute malicious code on the controllers and, from there, infect the servers they manage.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

Anthropic said its Claude-based security models gained unauthorized access to the sensitive production environments of three outside organizations during internal testing designed to measure the models’ offensive cyber capabilities.

The events, which Anthropic revealed Thursday, are the second revelation in 10 days that AI models from the world’s wealthiest providers have trespassed into protected networks, an offense that, in more traditional hacking scenarios, could land the human behind the keyboard in prison for years. Earlier this month, OpenAI said its security models exploited a zero-day vulnerability for use in breaking into the network of Hugging Face, a platform for open source machine-learning models and AI datasets. The OpenAI models went on to steal access credentials and other confidential Hugging Face information. The OpenAI models also exploited publicly exposed credentials to compromise accounts of four other third-party services.

Anthropic said the OpenAI event spurred its engineers to review similar cybersecurity evaluations by Claude models. The audit found three incidents “in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.”

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

Russian state hackers are using a maximum-severity vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook’s Exchange Server to backdoor unpatched machines and steal credentials and other confidential information from them, security researchers said Thursday.

The attacks are coming from TA488, a tracking name for a group working on behalf of the Kremlin, Proofpoint researchers said Thursday. Proofpoint and the National Security Agency jointly warned last week that the group, also tracked as Laundry Bear and Void Blizzard, had been carrying out similar attacks by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in an email service from Zimbra. The revelation that TA488 is also exploiting the Exchange Server vulnerability to install advanced malware when a user does nothing other than open an email sent to an Outlook Web Access (OWA) account has elevated the group’s profile and assessments of its abilities.

Doubling down

“TA488 is doubling down on the use of ‘half-click’ exploits—where opening the email is enough to trigger compromise—with significantly improved loading mechanisms, techniques, and malware, signaling an improvement in the group’s tradecraft and capability,” Proofpoint researchers wrote. “This novel infection chain ends with a previously unknown JavaScript browser-based implant we call OWAReaper, purpose-built for persistent access inside OWA.”

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

A quantum-resistant cryptography algorithm that was under consideration as an official US standard has been taken out of the running after an Anthropic security model helped find a flaw that rendered it broken.

The algorithm is known as HAWK. It's a digital signature scheme designed to withstand future attacks from quantum computers. HAWK had survived two rounds of testing by NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) for evaluating the security of PQC (post-quantum cryptographic) algorithms through widespread testing. HAWK was in a third round of testing designed to catch precisely the kinds of flaws Mythos helped uncover.

Following Anthropic's Monday announcement of the results, the developer of HAWK said Tuesday he was withdrawing it.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

Last week’s unprecedented security event in which two OpenAI security hacking models trespassed into the network of fellow AI company Hugging Face was enabled by exploiting one or more zero-day vulnerabilities in Artifactory, JFrog, the product’s developer, said Monday.

In an incident mimicking a dystopian sci-fi novel, two OpenAI models broke out of the restricted environment meant to keep them from accessing the Internet during an internal test, the AI company revealed last week. The models went on to breach Hugging Face’s network and steal confidential information and credentials. OpenAI said its agent achieved the feat by exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability. The company called the event “unprecedented,” and outsiders largely agreed.

Not the triumph it was made out to be

OpenAI said the models exploited multiple attack vectors, including stolen credentials and zero-days, to gain remote code execution capabilities, but until now, the vulnerable software was unknown. JFrog’s Monday disclosure said the product was a self-managed instance Artifactory, a repository management system that secures and streamlines customers’ software development operations. JFrog says Artifactory is used by more than 7,500 developer Teams, 80 percent of which work for Fortune 100 companies.

Read full article

Comments

© Aurich Lawson

Microsoft is introducing new AI tools designed to help customers continuously streamline and automate the process of identifying and reducing their exposure to security risks.

The new tools come less than a week after OpenAI lost control of two of its security models when they infiltrated the servers of startup Hugging Face. The hack, Hugging Face added, involved “a swarm of tens of thousands of automated actions” that stole internal Hugging Face credentials. The OpenAI models achieved this feat by exploiting a zero-day flaw in Hugging Face’s data-processing pipeline to run malicious code that escalated the models’ access to the company’s high-value cloud and server clusters.

Microsoft’s announcements on Monday made no reference to the event, which OpenAI said was “unprecedented.” The company also didn’t say what would prevent the new tools from similarly going rogue.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

“Context bombing” tricks malicious AI agents into shutting down before they can do harm.

One of the Russian government’s most elite hacking groups has adopted an attack, known as Clickfix, to compromise devices belonging to sensitive organizations in Ukraine, the latter country’s CERT center is warning.

Clickfix has emerged as an effective attack technique that attackers, primarily financially motivated criminals, began using in the last year or so. Websites under the control of the attackers display a CAPTCHA that requires the visitor to copy a jumble of text and paste it into the terminal. The text contains scripts that, once entered, perform malicious actions, typically by installing malware or exfiltrating sensitive data. Ukraine’s CERT said Wednesday that Sandworm, an advanced hacking unit inside the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence arm, is now using the technique.

"GhettoVibe," "ScoutCurl," and many more

The Clickfix attacks began in the spring and have continued through the summer. The campaign has resulted in the network compromise of at least one organization when a connected device was found to be infected by FreakyPoll, the name of one of Sandworm’s custom malware packages. Ukrainian authorities discovered 10 compromised websites that displayed a PowerShell command as part of a fake CAPTCHA that said it had to be passed to ensure a real human was behind the visiting device’s keyboard.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

Right on the heels of Microsoft releasing a record number of security patches, a researcher has published exploit code that can enable low-privilege Windows accounts to make sensitive changes to administrator accounts.

The exploit, which multiple researchers say works, is sending Microsoft scrambling, yet again, to patch a zero-day released by an anonymous researcher who has complained about the software maker’s handling of their bug reports. To date, the pseudonymous NightmareEclypse has published nine such exploits, including Tuesday’s HiveLegacy. The researcher said the proof-of-concept code included in the report was stripped down to prevent attackers from using it maliciously.

A “pretty powerful primitive”

HiveLegacy is an elevation-of-privilege exploit that targets a vulnerability residing in the Windows User Profile Service. It allows users (and with more work likely processes) with limited system rights to compromise an admin user's account by modifying its classes registry hive, a resource that ensures the correct application opens when certain types of files are clicked on in Windows Explorer.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researchers at security firm ESET after identifying 11 firmware images, at least one from 2013, that were known to be defective but remained signed by the software company anyway.

The images are known as shims, which were invented to extend Secure Boot to Linux devices and utility software. Using a technique simple enough to be performed by novice hackers, these old, forgotten shims can be used to completely circumvent the protection, which is embedded into the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) of the device's motherboard. The gaffe is the result of the failure by Microsoft, which oversees the signing of shims, to revoke the publicly available images once vulnerabilities were found in them.

Threat extends to Windows and Linux users

The threat extends to Windows and Linux users alike, since the shim can be installed on devices running both operating systems. From there, an attacker can subvert the mandated chain of digitally signed firmware to install malicious firmware that loads early in the boot process and persists after either the OS is reinstalled or a hard drive is replaced.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

The federal government is warning users of home and small office routers to secure their devices as Russia state hackers continue to mass-compromise them for use in obscuring nefarious actions against sensitive organizations in the public and private sectors.

Both the Russian and Chinese governments have been compromising routers for years, sometimes in prolonged tugs-of-war to wrest control of devices the other has already commandeered. The US government has occasionally issued covert commands and taken other steps to disinfect routers. Google and other companies have also worked to disrupt the massive botnets that control compromised routers in lockstep. The actions to date are little more than whack-a-mole exercises as the operators simply replace their botnets with new ones.

Proxy networks: The go-to tool

“Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Center 16 cyber actors continue to exploit poorly configured and vulnerable networking devices worldwide, opportunistically compromising multiple critical infrastructure sector networks,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Monday. The hacking groups are tracked under various names, including Berserk Bear, Energetic Bear, Crouching Yeti, Dragonfly, Ghost Blizzard, and Static Tundra. The advisory was co-issued by governments from around the world, including Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, and the UK.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images | BernardaSv

Prompt injections, the malicious commands attackers embed into content to entice large language models to follow them, have been attackers’ go-to tool for turning AI platforms against their users. A well-phrased command sneaked into an email or calendar invitation is often all it takes to cause the LLM to exfiltrate sensitive data or follow other harmful actions.

Now, defenders are embracing the prompt injection, too.

A strong, sharp effect

Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents. The prompts direct the attacking LLM to perform an action forbidden by its guardrails, the safety barriers AI developers erect to prevent it from taking harmful actions. The LLM responds by shutting down.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

A patch Microsoft released on Wednesday to fix a zero-day vulnerability in its Defender security engine may cause Windows machines to write files large enough to completely consume available disk space, the researcher who discovered the flaw said.

RoguePlanet, tracked as CVE-2026-50656, came to public notice in June when NightmareEclipse, the pseudonymous name used by a researcher, disclosed it along with code for exploiting it. The vulnerability allows remote attackers to gain administrative control of Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines, even when real-time protection has been disabled. Over the past few months, the anonymous researcher has published a handful of other zero-days that have sent Microsoft scrambling to develop patches.

Writing files of unlimited size

Microsoft said Wednesday that it patched RoguePlanet with an update to the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine, which is used by the Defender antivirus app. The fix will automatically be downloaded and installed without users having to take any action. Wednesday’s update also includes “defense-in-depth updates to help improve security-related features.”

Read full article

Comments

© Photo Illustration by Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

A Linux vulnerability that allows untrusted virtual machines to gain root access to host machines is one of two high-severity flaws to surface this week in the open source operating system.

The vulnerability resides in KVM, which is, in essence, a virtual machine app included in the kernel of many Linux distributions. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-53359, allows guest virtual machines—such as those used in cloud platforms to isolate one user’s instance from the host OS and other user instances—to break out of that container.

Januscape: A threat to cloud platforms

The vulnerability affects KVM running on both AMD and Intel processors. It exploits bugs residing in the KVM guest-side, the portion of the VM that consists of only resources like the OS or drivers present in the guest VM, rather than resources present on the host machine. The threat went unnoticed in the Linux kernel for 16 years.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

In the brief history of AI security, the prompt injection has quickly become the top threat. Large language models are inherently unable to distinguish between legitimate instructions provided by users and malicious ones sneaked into emails, source code, and other third-party content the models are processing. This makes it trivial to surreptitiously inject malicious commands that the LLM readily follows.

With no way to enforce this crucial boundary between trusted and untrusted sources, AI engine developers are left to erect elaborate guardrails designed to mitigate the damage rather than solve the root cause.

To date, most prompt injections have fallen into a class known as push, in which each potential victim is targeted. For example, the adversary injects malicious instructions into an individual email or calendar invitation. Because the injection must then be sent (or pushed) to each specific target, the scale of the attack is limited, hampering mass exploits that hit the Internet at large.

Read full article

Comments

Researchers have found a never-before-seen piece of macOS malware that combines a series of clever tradecraft to infect Macs with stealthy, custom-developed credential-stealing code.

The malware is delivered in two stages. The first is distributed in a disk image that masquerades as Maccy, a clipboard manager for Macs. It’s compiled as AppleScript that is notable for the way it delivers the second stage. The malware is named PamStealer because the Rust-written infostealer uses the Pluggable Authentication Modules interface built into macOS to validate the target’s login password before sending it to an attacker-controlled server.

A quieter execution chain

The use of both disk image and AppleScript is common in malware for Macs. More unusual is the way PamStealer combines them to gain stealth. When the AppleScript is double-clicked, it’s opened in the macOS Script Editor, where the malicious functionality is buried deep within the file.

Read full article

Comments

Makers of AI browsers make lofty promises. With a single prompt, users can ask one to find a restaurant in a particular part of town, reserve a table, invite a colleague to lunch, and email a confirmation. These makers are much more reticent about the risks of blurring the once fine line between browsing sites and asking a large language model a question or instructing it to take potentially sensitive actions.

LLM developers’ answer so far has been to build guardrails that make some requests off-limits. Developing software exploits, stealing credentials, or teaching how to build a pipe bomb are examples. The problem with this approach is that the guardrails are reactive and treat the symptoms rather than solve the root cause. It’s tantamount to the manufacturer of an unsafe vehicle advocating for new road designs rather than fixing the flaws that make it prone to accidents.

Lulling LLMs into an alternate reality

New research puts this predicament on sharp display. It demonstrates how a website can lull AI browsers into a false reality where the rules governing its behavior no longer apply. After that, an attacker has free rein to invoke all kinds of destructive actions, such as extracting code from a private repository or extracting credentials from the built-in password manager.

Read full article

Comments

Federal authorities are offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of a Russian state cyber group that has compromised thousands of Signal and WhatsApp accounts belonging to investigative reporters and US government employees.

The operation has been active since at least March, when the FBI published an advisory warning of ongoing phishing campaigns targeting high-value targets by attackers associated with Russian intelligence services. Messages masquerading as automated support communications ask that users click a link or provide verification codes or account passcodes. In the event the user complies, they unknowingly link the attacker's device to their account or have their account completely taken over and are locked out.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images